BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Media Standards, Says Ofcom

The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.

An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".

The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".

The authority has ordered the BBC to broadcast a evening statement about its conclusions.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.

'Potential to Erode Credibility'

The watchdog's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent served in a role in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate.

"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he presented.

"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.

"This failing had the risk to damage the significantly high amounts of confidence that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."

The film was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.

A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."